NHL refs don’t get it
People who care passionately about the National Hockey League, who are invested in its future, who are personally responsible for everything from its blaring and bombastic arena presentation to its most quixotic analytics, are flummoxed over the game’s general perception in the week it has awarded its hallowed grand prize.
Yes, the Tampa Bay Lightning are resplendently worthy of the Stanley Cup. The Bolts just became the first club to win two Cups in a row since the Penguins in 2016 and 2017.
But the arduous NHL postseason that produced these particular Cup champions was widely regarded as an officiating calamity.
Commissioner Gary Bettman, chatting with Sportsnet’s Ron McLeary on Canadian TV after seven weeks of on-ice mayhem and whistle-wielding myopathy, informed the general hockey audience that when it comes to the difficult task of on-ice adjudication, “We’re getting it right virtually all the time, but not 100 percent of the time.”
Oh, Gary.
Perhaps you missed the Crosschecking Festival that played out over the continent since mid-May, in which players have been savaged by the shaft of opponents’ sticks to all manner of already-battered body parts, only to find this is apparently no longer a penalty, or rarely one.
Perhaps you missed the Magnificent Seven, when the New York Islanders gave up the go-ahead goal in Game 2 of the semifinals while the Lightning had seven skaters on the ice — seven being more than prescribed. Two more.
Perhaps you missed referee Chris Lee, gazing benignly at Vegas’ Brayden McNabb as he punched Montreal’s Nick Suzuki in the face right in front of his whistle. Play continued, just as it had when Lee watched Vegas’ Jonathan Marchessault perform some freelance rhinoplasty on the face of Montreal’s Corey Perry, swinging the blade of his stick into Perry’s face, later brought together with nine stitches.
The list of wrong or non-calls this postseason runs longer than most attention spans, but its impact might begin to metastasize for two reasons that really unnerve the league’s pilots. One is that the league seems enthusiastic about negating the talents of its truly gifted players in the postseason. The Hockey News reported that, after the four-game Edmonton-Winnipeg series, Rachel Doerrie, a former NHL consultant completing a master’s in data and analytics, isolated no fewer than 37 violations against Edmonton’s Connor McDavid, the league’s most ascendant star. None of them were called. McDavid did not draw a penalty in this postseason or last.
Why are penalties in the second period not penalties late in the third? Why are penalties in the regular season not penalties in the postseason? These are ageless, interminably confusing hockey questions.
What all of this has sparked, for better or worse and for want of a more political term, is a bout of Critical Ref Theory, also on the hockey scene for ages.
The task is hard enough. Hockey is a sport of flowing, roiling, random madness. NHL officials are the best in the world at sorting out the unsortable, but they are not “getting it right virtually all the time,” Gary.